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Early in the morning, Kitty somehow managed to twist open the trumpet lock on the bedroom door again, ran into the room, and started bouncing around on the bed—once more waking the Kryptonian from his sleep.
Whenever he slept alone, Henry never bothered closing the curtains. The morning sun would stream through the windows, giving the Kryptonian a free sunbath.
But today's awakening felt different from usual.
Henry jolted awake from a nightmare. Inside his mind lingered an incredibly vivid battle. Wearing Superman's classic suit, he had fought Marvel's mightiest hero—the Sentry—to the death…
At the same time, two completely different sets of memories tangled together in his mind, conflicting with one another.
His super-brain quickly sorted through the problem.
Henry did not lazily dismiss one set of memories as merely a dream or random fantasy.
Instead, it truly felt as though he had lived through two different lives.
In one life, Charlize Theron had been by his side, and it all ended with a final battle against the Sentry.
In the other, he remained forever single and simply slept in until waking naturally this morning.
If not for one crucial piece of evidence, Henry might have suspected he had developed schizophrenia.
No—more accurately, he had probably been schizophrenic for a long time already. Before, the symptoms had merely been latent, requiring some trigger for another personality to surface. But now it had become overt, as though two different selves had truly lived two different lives.
The major reason he could not dismiss either set of memories was this:
His Kryptonian eyes were half-crippled.
The ability to observe at the molecular level, X-ray vision, heat vision blasting from his eyes—all of it was gone.
Or perhaps "gone" was not entirely accurate.
It was more like paralysis. The legs still existed, but could no longer walk. Likewise, his eyeballs were still there, but all the powers gained from a Kryptonian absorbing yellow sunlight had been ruined.
Even his vision had deteriorated badly.
Henry once again experienced the feeling of nearsightedness from his previous life. His eyesight had probably dropped to around 0.8…
For ordinary people, that level was the sort of thing where wearing glasses was optional.
But for Henry, who had spent over eight years living with "Kryptonian dog eyes," it felt incredibly uncomfortable.
This was not the disappearance of powers.
It was the side effect of severe organ damage.
The evidence was the unbearable swelling in both eyes, as though a pale red filter had been laid across his retinas. Henry certainly did not consider that normal.
His arms were perfectly intact, and there was not a single wound on his body.
It was as though the memories of battling the Sentry were fake, which was why none of the injuries from those memories remained on him.
Then what explained the condition of his eyes?
In the ordinary everyday memories, there had been no sign of such damage.
But in the memories of the battle against the Sentry, there was an explanation.
He had apparently used his own eyeballs as the price to unleash some kind of beam attack that annihilated both the Sentry and… the Phoenix?
Before he could even think about whether the injury might recover, another question suddenly struck him.
Where was his girl?
He hurried out of bed and changed into casual clothes. Without even preparing Kitty's breakfast, he rushed upstairs and began pounding on a certain apartment door.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
"Who is it? So early in the morning—you're driving me crazy!"
A sleepy-eyed woman opened the door without any caution.
This was the girl's roommate, an office worker at a trading company.
The moment she saw Henry standing there, she jumped in fright and slammed the door shut, unwilling to let a young man see her face without makeup.
From behind the door, the roommate shouted:
"Um… what do you need?"
"Has Charlize come back?"
"Charlize? Who?"
The woman opened the door again slightly, peeking at Henry through the crack.
"Uh… are you sure you've got the wrong apartment?"
"No. Charlize Theron. Your roommate. Hasn't she come home yet?"
As he asked the question, Henry suddenly remembered that she should currently be filming in Australia. Of course she wouldn't be back home.
He was just about to apologize and make up some excuse to end the misunderstanding when he heard an utterly unbelievable reply.
"My roommate? My only roommate is Millie. She already left for work at the bakery. Where did this Charlize Theron come from? Who's that?"
The woman pulled the door open a little wider, looking completely baffled.
Henry resisted the urge to push his way inside and check Charlize Theron's room himself to prove this woman was joking with him.
Instead, he politely stepped back.
"Sorry. Maybe I mixed things up. Looks like I'm still half-asleep."
"Oh! Isn't Charlize Theron that young actress who got pretty famous last year? Don't tell me you stayed up too late watching her movies and had some kind of dream, then thought it was real?"
The woman suddenly looked delighted, as though she had stumbled onto juicy gossip, and boldly opened the door wider.
Patting his head, Henry forced a smile.
"Ah… you caught me."
The woman simply opened the door all the way and leaned against it in a seductive pose.
"Movie stars can only be admired on a screen. Why not pay attention to someone nearby you can actually touch?"
"I was being inappropriate. But showing up this early in the morning probably isn't the best timing either. Sorry about that."
Henry stepped back again with an awkward expression and pointed toward his hair.
Actually, it wasn't Henry's hair that was messy.
The woman's long hair had clearly been thoroughly "worked over" the night before. Fresh out of bed, it was a complete mess.
The woman, who had been absentmindedly twirling her hair around her fingers, suddenly realized how awful she probably looked.
With a shriek, she slammed the door shut again.
Henry took the opportunity to leave, desperately trying to figure out what exactly was going on with this world.
First, he checked the situation at home.
Everything matched his memories—
No, wait. One thing was different.
The digital camera equipment he had used to help the girl practice acting was gone.
Everything else remained the same: the items confiscated by the FBI and later transferred to Sony, then rebuilt after he blew them up.
That included BB, the core robotic cleaning-and-feeding system, along with its various multifunctional arm attachments.
The butcher's delivery guy who brought Kitty's daily supply of fresh meat that morning still begged to pet the tiger just once.
Henry still did not dare agree.
The bedroom window and the surrounding wall had been repaired and replaced. Those were traces left from when SHIELD agents disguised as an FBI SWAT team had raided the apartment, forcing him to smash through the window to escape.
Clearly, that incident had still happened.
But all the traces of daily life inside the apartment belonged only to him.
There was no toothbrush left behind by the girl, no spare clothes, no tableware belonging to her.
Everything from that other set of memories felt fake now.
The warmth of the embrace he longed for suddenly seemed unreal.
Ignoring whatever thoughts the Kryptonian was lost in while holding warm fresh meat, Kitty gnawed on Henry's calf, trying to inform him that she was hungry
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